SOPA–How It Will Affect You?

What is SOPA?

Here’s what Wikipedia says “The originally proposed bill would allow the U.S. Department of Justice, as well as copyright holders, to seek court orders against websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement.”

Now what it actually means?

It’s a power in hand to the copyright holders to take down the infringing content. Even without this bill, still there are ways to deal with copyright infringements, but SOPA wants total purification of the content. Here’s how!

According to SOPA, every websites accused of enabling or facilitating copyright infringement should be bared of

• all online advertisements networks.
• all the payment facilitators like PayPal, AlertPay and more
• such websites are denied to link with all the search engines.
• no Internet Service Providers are allowed to access those websites.

Now that’s the spark from SOPA and how it spreads or how it works?

Once such websites are found they are highly penalized, one such example mentioned there in the Wikipedia, that “maximum penalty of five years in prison for 10 pieces of music or movies within six months.”

SOPA may not be able to manage the whole, vast web, so it going to manage or track such copyrighted work. SOPA provides legal rights to the Internet services, that they can take action against websites dedicated to infringement.

How You Can Use SOPA?

Two Step Verifications is what you(Webmasters) got as a power in your hand. Using the two step verification method webmasters can requests, in writing, about the copyright infringement, how they are affected by that, what all payment facilitators are used by them, ad networks used by them and the cause or the copyrighted work they’ve copied from your website, you being the copyright holder of the same. Forward that to the copyright infringing website owner, wait till it counter notifies you regarding the issue.

But I oppose this, How it Affects you?

Right to Speech

Google says, webmasters, content writers, bloggers are allowed to right their opinion about any services, or anything you feel writing about. but original content should also make timely presence on your blog, websites. But SOPA says no copyright content, no hate speech, insults to public officials, or political dissent is allowed to right there on the blogs, websites. Who is going to follow this?

Web Hosting Services are in great danger. How?

GoDaddy, leading provider of services like web hosting, domains, has already opposed the SOPA by saying “Fighting online piracy is of the utmost importance, which is why Go Daddy has been working to help craft revisions to this legislation – but we can clearly do better”(said by Warren Adelman, Go Daddy’s newly appointed CEO). If the bill becomes law then,

• Etsy, Vimeo, Flickr will be no more to entertain netizens.
• The bill would ban linking to sites deemed offending, even in search results and on services such as Twitter. Means, half of the Twitter is down. Webmasters, Bloggers won’t be able to use Twitter as a marketing tool.
• Most of the cloud computing services and other web hosting services will be out of business, if and only if the bill becomes the law. Do you want that?

Web Related Business would no more be a craze

Rules demanded by the bill are so broad anyone has a right or power to take potential action against the another. If this is the way, then the whole internet will be down in no time. The rules suggested by the bill are so unrealistic, implementation of these rules is something way beyond the power of normal human beings. Most of the websites, services like AOL, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Zynga, and Facebook have all signed a letter to congress that opposes SOPA.

Uploading content? Wait!!

According to the bill, a user cannot upload a video on YouTube of their children singing to a copyrighted song. This hilarious example is given by Wikipedia. Now tell me, does that rule makes sense to you? I mean what kind of suggestion or rule is that under the legislation of which a user is denied to upload such video on YouTube(Internet). Same goes to the blogger, Webmasters, if you don’t want to end up in prison, then you cannot upload or infringe anybody’s content in this way.

Business based Internal Networks are at threat!

If your firm or company shares an internal network, that spreads across different offices, locations, that shares the copyright material within the network, then you are at risk. Entire Virtual Private Network and the web hosting company are at threat. Companies dependent on such networks can count there days to dusk.

Open Source Software will be no more

Open Source software adds to the online piracy as said by the SOPA bill. So that means all the open source software will not be entertained on the web. By the way, Mozilla Firefox is one of the best web browser, you must be using, lies in this category.

DMCA(Digital Millennium Copyright Act) will be shattered

For now DMCA protects websites like YouTube, social networking websites, content uploading services but the rules contradict the part, that means DMCA won’t be a much effective way to deal with copyright infringement in the future. They oppose the fact that DMCA is totally based upon the webmaster, blogger, if they does not actively reports the copyright infringement cases, then they are simply avoiding to complaint the copyright infringement case, wherein SOPA holds the key, they are free to take down the copyright infringing content or even the whole website. But to me(Webmaster,blogger), DMCA is a sure shot tool to fight the piracy, but SOPA is something literally more than what is actually required.

If SOPA goes live, the internet will surely go down.Do you think this is the right way to deal with piracy? What’s your opinion on that, FOR, AGAINST, NEUTRAL? Do share your views with us.